Not Being Ugly Quotes

If you look at all the vampires in the past, they were sort of decrepit old men. Stephanie Meyers just made it for a new audience. All the vampires are now young men and she describes them as not being ugly. ~ Daniel Cudmore

Here is the difference between Oscar Wilde and me. For all the tortures he suffered, for all the ugliness of being punished for loving men, nobody read his lines and asked him: What does your husband think of that? Jail, exile
these were his lot. But never, What does your husband think?
Women may have the vote, but they are not free as long as that reaction erupts. Even those without husbands are judged as if they had offended them merely by writing the truth.
So immovable is the wall around a woman's freedom that she can't do a things without being asked to think of its effect upon some man who is presumed to be more important than she. ~ Erica Jong

If you are not scared then there is no merit in being brave. ~ Kerry Greenwood

Luxury means being able to relax and savor the moment, knowing that it doesn't get any better than this.

Feeling that way doesn't require money. It doesn't require the perfect scenery. All that's required is an ability to survey a landscape that is disheveled, that is off-kilter, that is slightly unattractive or unsettling, and say to yourself: this is exactly how it should be. This requires a big shift in perspective: Since your thoughts and feelings can't simply be turned off, you have to train your thoughts and feelings to experience imperfections as acceptable or preferable--even divine.

The sky is gray. A fly lands on you hand. Your cocktail is lukewarm. And still, for some reason, if you slow down and accept reality enough, it starts to feel right. Better than right. You are not comparing reality to some imagined perfect alternative. You are welcoming reality for what it already is.

And what if you have no cocktail, because you're sober now? And what if your neck is aching? Maybe you're running late. Maybe you feel anxious. Still, you pay attention to each little fold, each disappointment, each impatient attempt by mind and body to "fix" what already is. And then surrender to all of it. These details are irreplaceable. They give the moment its value. The chance to soak in this mundane, uneven moment is the purest luxury of all. ~ Heather Havrilesky

We teach our players, in response to any situation they face, to press pause and ask: What does this situation require of me?
Pressing pause gives you time to think. It gets you off autopilot and helps you gain clarity about the outcome you are pursuing, the situation you are experiencing, and the Above the Line action you need to take to achieve the outcome.
There are two important benefits of pressing pause:
A) It helps you avoid doing something foolish or harmful
B) It focuses you on acting with purpose to accomplish your goals
A productive pause could last only a split second, which helps you regain your focus and take control of your action. It could last an hour, a day, or longer. The purpose is to take the time necessary to be intentional about the way you think and act. Pressing pause does not come naturally; it is a skill that must be developed. The more you practice, the more skilled you become at being able to identify how and when to use it effectively. ~ Urban Meyer

It was the time of night when the odd feeling of not being quite in focus comes and goes, and all things are mysterious. ~ Tracy Kidder

One knew in advance that life in New York would not be easy, but there were cheap rents in cold-water lofts without heat, and the excitement of being here made up for those hardships. I didn't move to New York to make a fortune. ~ David Byrne

I remember being a 12 year old art kid and feeling like there was no exciting art movement happening, especially for somebody like me. I was looking around for artistic inspiration and could find nothing - until my older brother's friend brought a Giger book over to the house. Upon seeing the first image I knew I would never be the same. A whole new world opened up to me and I have been exploring it ever since. It's no doubt that I would not be here today, doing what I do, without his influence. H.R. Giger is the king of the Dark Art movement. ~ Chet Zar

an idealist is a hypocrite, because he is always trying to become what he is not, instead of being and understanding what he is. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

Art when really understood is the province of every human being. It is simply a question of doing things, anything, well. It is not an outside, extra thing. ~ Robert Henri

Quentin Schultze says that we have become like tourists who are so enamored by our mode of transportation that we cruise through nation after nation largely indifferent to the people and the cultures around us. We have our passports filled with the little stamps telling people just how many places we've been, but what is the purpose of being in places if we have not experienced them? And what is the purpose of knowing people if we do not care to know them on anything more than a surface level? The trend today is toward these fleeting, surface-level interactions ~ Tim Challies

[I]n Africa I was a member of a family - of a sort of family that the people of your culture haven't known for thousands of years. If gorillas were capable of such an expression, they would tell you that their family is like a hand, of which they are the fingers. They are fully aware of being a family but are very little aware of being individuals. Here in the zoo there were other gorillas - but there was no family. Five severed fingers do not make a hand. ~ Daniel Quinn

You're just selfish," she says.
"Go fuck yourself," he says quietly.
"You said you'd be nice."
"I'm not selfish."
"Sure you are. You love everything for as long as it's easy then as soon as you have to actually empathise with another human being you get claustrophobic. ~ Exurb1a

Life is a journey. It is not about where you are going or where you end up, it is about what takes you there. You can plan the path you take, but life has a way of throwing obstacles into your path that make you change course. It is not "divine intervention" or "destiny"; it is the reality of being a human being. ~ Courtney Lynn

Since science's competence extends to observable and measurable phenomena, not to the inner being of things, and to the means, not to the ends of human life, it would be nonsense to expect that the progress of science will provide men with a new type of metaphysics, ethics, or religion. ~ Jacques Maritain

I am and always will be a sinner. But that's the beautiful thing about Jesus. I'll always try to be a better person in the eyes of God. But I'm not all of a sudden stepping up on a pedestal and saying I'm holier than thou, 'cause I'm not! ~ Billy Ray Cyrus

Being alone when one's belief is firm, is not to be alone. ~ Berthold Auerbach

Pre-existing conditions for those previously insured must not lead to someone being unable to get insurance. ~ Mitt Romney

What does it mean to be cultured? Who is the cultured person? The cultured individual is not defined nor determined by status in society nor by wealth; but the cultured individual is determined and defined by his or her sense for the art of life. And what is the art of life? The art of life is the reflection of the mind and the soul upon the world, upon other people, upon the respect and understanding of other people and upon the things that are in this world and beyond. There is a joy that is always sought in beautiful things. Being cultured is being conscious, reflective, understanding, feeling, aware. Knowing how to feel, to listen, to understand. A desire to find or to create joy in many things - that is the art of life. And these things define a cultured person. ~ C. JoyBell C.

Time isn't precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time - past and future - the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Contemplative love seeks a heroic deed that can be accomplished without delay and in full view of everyone. Indeed, some people are even ready to lay down their lives as long as the process is not long drawn out but takes place quickly, as though it were being staged for everybody to watch and applaud. Active love, on the other hand, is unremitting hard work and tenacity, and for some it is a veritable science. But ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

It's not that God, the environment, and other people cannot help us to be happy or find satisfaction. It's just that our happiness, satisfaction, and our understanding, even of God, will be no deeper than our capacity to know ourselves inwardly, to encounter the world from the deep comfort that comes from being at home in one's own skin, from an intimate familiarity with the ways of one's own mind and body. ~ Jon Kabat-Zinn

When the CERN teams reported a 'five-sigma' result for the Higgs boson, corresponding to a P-value of around 1 in 3.5 million, the BBC reported the conclusion correctly, saying this meant 'about a one-on-3.5 million chance that the signal they see would appear if there were no Higgs particle.' But nearly every other outlet got the meaning of this P-value wrong. For example, Forbes Magazine reported, 'The chances are less than 1 in a million that it is not the Higgs boson,' a clear example of the prosecutor's fallacy. The Independent was typical in claiming that 'there is less than a one in a million chance that their results are a statistical fluke.' This may not be blatantly mistaken as Forbes, but it is still assigning the small probability to 'their results are a statistical fluke', which is logically the same as saying this is the probability of the null hypothesis being tested. ~ David Spiegelhalter

Ask me not, 'Are you rightwing,' but ask me 'Are you a committed believer in individual freedom, the values of the enlightenment?' Then, yeah, if being rightwing means believing Adam Smith was right, both in the 'Wealth of Nations' and the 'Theory of Moral Sentiments,' then I'm rightwing. ~ Niall Ferguson

There are the people who read my horror novels - the first two of them - and they found them scary or whatever, and then there are some people who are maybe not entirely stable who think that they're real, who think that they're being stalked by the same demons or ghosts that are mentioned in the books. ~ David Wong

I am not a politician and I have no intention of being one. ~ Sean Connery

Why this should be so is hard to say; one might be tempted to believe that it was based on some ancient convention that originally had a practical purpose, such as a cellar being cold and therefore best suited for storing corpses, and that this principle had been retained in our era of refrigerators and cold-storage rooms, had it not been for the notion that transporting bodies upward in buildings seems contrary to the laws of nature, as though height and death are mutually incompatible. ~ Karl Ove Knausgaard

There are various art forms we may or may not have talent for, may or may not have time for, and we may or may not be able to express ourselves in, but we ought to consider this fact-that whether we choose to be an environment or not, we are. We produce an environment other people have to live in. We should be conscious of the fact that this environment which we produce by our very 'being' can affect the people who live with us or work with us. ~ Edith Schaeffer

He stayed with her for so long because he liked the idea of being in love. He has an empty well in his heart that needs to be filled by someone. Anyone. But that's not enough for me, and it won't be enough for him either once he finally realizes the truth. ~ Stephanie Perkins

Studies of people who report high well-being in their fifties and sixties indicate that they have lived lives that involved personal risks. They are not people whose lives have been calm and predictable. A life under tight control sometimes produces quiet desperation. High well-being is a life that has depth and quality. Risks, losses, problems, and tragedy add pain to a life. That pain becomes a teacher. We learn; the pain gives us no choice. ~ Jennifer James

That which is striking and beautiful is not always good, but that which is good is always beautiful. ~ Ninon De L'Enclos

You don't have to work at what you are. Part of what you are is what you think you are, but what you think you are is not all of what you are. It is just an aspect of what you are. Being buddha means being unattached to your thoughts about what you are. If you think you are a worthy person or an unworthy person, not grasping those thoughts is buddha. ~ Reb Anderson

Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history. Even the child Ruth May touched history. Everyone is complicit. The okapi complied by living, and the spider by dying. It would have lived if it could. Listen: being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different, though. You could say the view is larger. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

It is a strange notion that the acknowledgment of a first principle is inconsistent with the admission of secondary ones. To inform a traveler respecting the place of his ultimate destination, is not to forbid the use of land-marks and direction-posts on the way. The proposition that happiness is the end and aim of morality, does not mean that no road ought to be laid down to that goal, or that persons going thither should not be advised to take one direction rather than another. Men really ought to leave off talking a kind of nonsense on this subject, which they would neither talk nor listen to on other matters of practical concernment. Nobody argues that the art of navigation is not founded on astronomy, because sailors cannot wait to calculate the Nautical Almanack. Being rational creatures, they go to sea with it ready calculated; and all rational creatures go out upon the sea of life with their minds made up on the common questions of right and wrong, as well as on many of the far more difficult questions of wise and foolish. And this, as long as foresight is a human quality, it is to be presumed they will continue to do. Whatever we adopt as the fundamental principle of morality, we require subordinate principles to apply it by: the impossibility of doing without them, being common to all systems, can afford no argument against any one in particular: but gravely to argue as if no such secondary principles could be had, and as if mankind had remained till now, and always ~ John Stuart Mill

The most difficult lesson is not being bitter - that balancing you need to do so you don't become bitter, even as you cease being gullible. ~ Psyche Roxas-Mendoza

When men in secular life, who might be religious or not, see women being treated as secondary in the eyes of God, they assume that it's OK for them to do it. ~ Jimmy Carter

The only really Christian art is that which, like St. Francis, does not fear being wedded to poverty. This rises far above art-as-ornament. ~ Andre Gide

Listen, you don't have to get up or anything. Galen just...uh...went for a swim. He'll be back real soon."
I look between them and past the beach. I shake my head.
"What? What's wrong, Emma?" he asks. I like Toraf. He seems genuinely concerned about me, without ever having met me. Rayna looks as if she might want to stomp on my head and finish the job I started with the cafeteria door.
"Storm," I say. The one syllable word polka-dots my vision.
Toraf smiles. "He'll be back before the storm. Can I get you anything? Something to eat? Something to drink?"
"A taxi?" Rayna pitches in.
"Go to the kitchen, Rayna," he says. "Unless you're ready to go find an island?"
I'm not sure how far away the kitchen is, but it seems like she stomps for a good five minutes. Finding an island doesn't really seem like a fitting punishment for being rude, but since I do have a head injury, I give them the benefit of the doubt. Plus, there's always the possibility that I imagined the whole thing.
"Do you mind if I sit?" Toraf says.
I shake my head. He eases onto the edge of the couch and pulls the blanket back over me. I hope he takes my nod for "Thanks."
He crouches down and whispers, "Listen, Emma. Before Galen gets back. There's something I want to ask you. Oh, don't worry, it's a yes or no question. No talking involved."
I hope he takes my nod for "Sure, why not? You're nice."
He glances around, as if he's about to rob me instead of ask ~ Anna Banks

P11- when people cherish some set of values and do not feel any threat to them they experience well being
12- we are frequently told that the problems of our decade.. have shifted from the external realm of economics and now have to do with the quality of individual life. ~ C. Wright Mills

I think primary voters have a right to know. And Donald's Trump excuse of it that he's being audited, look, that makes it even more important for him to release his taxes, so that voters can see if there is - Mitt Romney suggested there could be a bombshell there. I don't know if there is or not. But Donald is hiding them from the voters, and I think he owes candor to the voters. ~ Ted Cruz

In my experience - and this is a very awkward way to put it, since I don't really know what the word experience means - the strangest people in one's life are the people one has known and loved, still know and will always love. Here, both I and the vocabulary are both in trouble, for strangest does not imply stranger. A stranger is a stranger is a stranger, simply, and you watch the stranger to anticipate his next move. But the people who elicit from you a depth of attention and wonder which we helplessly call love are perpetually making moves which cannot possibly be anticipated. Eventually, you realize that it never occurred to you to anticipate their next move, not only because you couldn't but because you didn't have to: it was not a question of moving on the next move, but simply, of being present. Danger, true, you try to anticipate and you prepare yourself, without knowing it, to stand in the way of death. For the strangest people in the world are those people recognized, beneath one's senses, by one's soul - the people utterly indispensable for one's journey. ~ James Baldwin

When I pursued an education in healing in the USA in 1984, I was told that I had the capacity to become a crownchakrahealer, a spiritual healer, to act as a channel and catalyst for spiritual energy from the 7th chakra through the heart. At that time I had no idea what a crownchakrahealer really was and since than it has been a continuous process during the last 17 years to deepen and develop my understanding about what a crownchakrahealer is. This process has resulted in a way of working I call "Synchronicity – Transmission of the Light", which uses healing and energy work from the Source on a formless level. With this way of working I have worked with groups up to 80 people. It is really a way of working, which goes around the ego and speaks directly to the heart. It allows a person to come in direct contact with his own inner being, with his own life source. With my intellect I still do not understand how this way of working functions. It is not a way of working, which can be understood on a method plane. It is a way of working, which relates directly to the heart and which can only be understood through insight and experience.
One participant in Gothenburg in Sweden described his experience of Synchronicity as being like a thousand suns suddenly had been lit in his own consciousness. He says: "It was like an inner explosion, an expansion of my own consciousness – and I felt only love for the other people in the room". ~ Swami Dhyan Giten

The essential insight and consistent point of view of Islam is tawhid: the fundamental Oneness underlying all of existence. From the perspective of tawhid, everything is emerging from God, being sustained by God, and ultimately returning to God. This has profound significance for all of our experience within this existence. All areas of human knowledge are related to this fundamental, unifying Truth. Sufism is the science, the objective knowledge, of the souls relationship to God. This science describes an Origin, a downward arc of manifestation, and an upward arc of return. In the arc of manifestation, everything is coming down from God into successive levels of ever denser realities. In the arc of return, we recognize our Origin and begin the journey back toward its light. This essentially means that we ourselves must become more conscious of the light within ourselves.

[...]

The arc of return calls us to make a journey from darkness and toward the light. The immediate darkness we face around us is the imaginary world created by human ignorance, fear, self-righteousness, and hatred. We must not succumb to the mass heedlessness and self-hypnotism which presents itself to us, mostly through the mass media, as the so-called real world.
It is our responsibility to find and act upon the knowledge that can guide us in that journey. This means establishing the truth of tawhid within our own minds and hearts.

~ Essays and talks by Kabir Helmins ~ Kabir Edmund Helminski

None deserve praise for being good who have not the spirit to be bad: goodness, for the most part, is nothing but indolence or weakness of will. ~ Francois De La Rochefoucauld

When times are not so prosperous, we think at least our successful career will save us and our families from failure and despair. We are attracted, against our skepticism, to the idea that poverty will be alleviated by the crumbs that fall from the rich man's table ... Some of us often feel, and most of us sometimes feel, that we are only someone if we have made it: can look down on those who have not. The American dream is often a very private dream of being a star, the uniquely successful and admirable one, the one who stands out from the crowd of ordinary folk, who don't know how. And since we have believed in that dream for a long time and worked very hard to make it come true, it is hard for us to give it up, even though it contradicts another dream that we have - that of living in a society that would really be worth living in.3 ~ Chris Hedges